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We currently have 5 Carni-cross hives doing well on 4.9 foundation. Some frames will have to be redrawn. We are still hoping to shakedown two more hives, although it may be late in the season. We have raised two queens from the first 4.9 hive and would like to place them with the hives we shakedown next. I am sure we will have to shake these down again next year, although, these hives have made over 5 gal. of honey this season.
I am wondering what to expect next from this breed of bee? Has anyone else worked with Carniolans on 4.9 foundation? None of these bees have had medication this season. If anyone can give us any insights on what to expect next, we would appreciate the feedback.

You wrote:
We are still hoping to shakedown two more hives, although it may be late in the season.

Reply:
If you shake them down late, be prepared to place full frames of honey and pollen from your other 49ers into them to help them overwinter, also some extracted wets into the center so the newly shaken down queens will have an instant place to lay eggs and raise sufficient brood and build up to help them overwinter. Calculate at least 2-3 broodcycles needed for raising brood with the shakedowns before hard winter to get sufficient new bees, which will be needed for startup the following spring. Watch them for stores, since they won't have much of their own to work wich having been shaken down.

I have hives of carniolan bee /and crosses on 4.9mm cell sizing. Going into my third season without and chems, drugs,oils, acids and such. The carniolan bee needs much brooding space and you would do well by providing lots of room for the carni queens. Also keep a ruler handy and measure comb. What appears to be 4.9 isn't always that way. Just keep working the smallest comb toward the center and the largest to outsides and up. Once the combs are established just basic beekeeping. I'd work on queen rearing as you might wish to stay away from the queens coming off the larger cells. I like honeybees in general so when the neighbors bees setup in empties (yellow stock) I leave them be. I requeen later when needed. I like free bees :&gt; )

Thank-you to both Dee and Clay for your response. Sorry we have been so slow in responding back. The Carni's do seem to be working well, although they didn't draw many useable brood frames of comb this year. Possibly we will get 1 or 2 per hive.

This is to Clay, I do like the thought of using queens from clean comb so we have been raising a few queens of our own. I think we will need to raise more this year. We also plan to shake down the rest of our hives this year. Two of these are Italian, these should be requeened with Carni queens first, I think?

Two of our 49rs started into the winter with a small cluster on one and short honey supplies on the other, both of these are being heated from below with a 25 watt light bulb through a screened bottom board. We will let you know next summer how well it worked.

Thank-you Dee for your pioneering work, this is the way beekeeping should be done!

Thanks for your reply, so far the Carni's are working for us. I don't know of any other bee that will work here in the northwest. We are at about 10 hives now and hope to increase that to, between 50 and 100 hives this season. We wish you well on your endeavor. Please let us know how things are going. Sincerely,

Actually, my now dead bees were Carni-Italian cross, and I am now starting over and I am going to try a whole bunch of different strains and breeds to see which do best. I think it will be a great experiment.

On April 1st we placed 30 packages of Carni's on 4.9 foundation. I went into these last week and they seemed to be doing very well. We picked the bees up in Orland, Ca. and drove them to Spokane, Wa. in two days.
I believe that placing packages on 4.9 will work quicker than shaking down hives. We have some of these that are drawing really good comb. Shortly after this we split our other 10 hives into 19. Ten of these will still need to go to 4.9. At this point we have a total of 49 hives, 39 on 4.9.
Soon we will shake the other 10 down to 4.9. We will keep you posted as to progress of these packages. Anyone with any comments, questions, or assistance-please respond.

Travis, you went right through my town, Medford Oregon, by the way, how was traffic on the viaduct? Anyway, I will be going down to Glenn CA to get 10 packages of Carni's and 10 Italians this Saturday. I will document all my progress and ups and down on www.allnaturalhoney.com

Hi Sol, we traveled I-5 to 97, so we were east of the mountains from Medford.
Sol, we are phasing out our Italian queens and replacing them with Carni crosses or caucasian crosses. We've not had much luck with Italian stock drawing out 4.9 foundation. It seems like the yellower the bee the messier the comb ends up. So we killed out the Italian queens and we are letting the Carni queens hatch new brood. Then we will shake our last ten hives down on 4.9 foundation. P.S. we are looking for some good, clean & hygienic caucasian queens. If anyone knows someone with this stock please notify us. Thank-you!